Tag Archives: Pets

Have you considered having your dead puppy stuffed? Or perhaps turning it into a rug? Or a drone? With no established style to mourn the loss of a loved animal, pet proprietors have turned to any number of curious methods

This year, a woman from Dundee posted an unusual ad for her puppy, Snoopy, on Facebook’s Marketplace. The unusual thing about it was that the dog was dead.” Had our dog turned into a rug when he died ,” the ad read.” Treasured family pet. Has to be sold as new puppy maintains trying to hump it. Lookin for 100 pound ONO. Very cosy and unusual piece .”

Cosy is questionable; unusual was an understatement. Snoopy’s flattened kind and smiling face were considered so shocking that editors on the Telegraph and Argus and the Dundee Evening Telegraph set warns at the top of their tales. By then the ad had already been howled off Facebook and the owner of the dead pet had backed away into anonymity.

What do you do with a dead pet? What is the appropriate parting to these beings that psychologists bellow “self-objects”, so familiar they are almost a part of you, sighing sympathetically while you weep, cavorting idiotically, loving you uncritically. How do you cope without the pet whose lifespan encompassed long-outgrown childhoods and that your children loved sometimes more than they loved their parents?

And why, when we stimulate desirable items out of leather, and admire stuffed animals in natural history museums and pass the mounted head of a stag without a second glance, why does turning this pet into an animal scalp seem so … incorrect?

Psychologists can explain how we love the way a pet offers uncritical, uncalculating affection in an otherwise conditional world. They talk of pets as witness to our lives. I’m with them on that. More than a year after the second of our own borders terriers died, her earthly remains, along with her mother’s from a couple of years earlier, are still boxed up just as they came from the pet crematorium. They live under a chair, out of sight, but not in any way finished with. For a start, we still have to summon the fortitude to say goodbye. And we can’t decide how to do it: burying in the garden, or scattering along the way of a favourite walk? Casual and informal, or with readings and tearful recollections? This is what they call disenfranchised grief.

Sam Carr, a psychology lecturer at the University of Bath who is interested in animals and attachment hypothesi, says pets are” there in every page of your narrative. When you lose that various kinds of figure, there’s a trauma .” It is a kind of bereavement, which demands some formal reaction. But there isn’t one.” I’ve never met anyone who either scalped or stuffed their pet ,” says Carr,” but I can imagine it offered some kind of respectful way of commemorating their life, maybe a tribute or a festivity .”

Of course, they used wild animals. We may try to avoid thinking about current realities of stuffing a wild animal, but it is not- yet- an uncomfortable idea. My stuffed kingfisher will not shock.

According to Clare Fowler, the taxidermist I took my kingfisher to, people who want their pets stuffed often come to her as I did, in a state of unanticipated bereavement. She thinks that taxidermy serves as a waypost in the process of grieving. The ones who call her in advance- she works in deep, rural Dorset- because they are going to have their pet put down, usually change their intellects after they have understood what taxidermy entails.

The day I go, she is working on an old lady’s pet cat, the second she has done for this client. It lies on her workbench- or at least the cat’s head, still attached to its empty scalp, lies there looking mildly astounded. Fowler will make a fibreglass mould from the body that the fur once encased, and then, after preserving the scalp, stretch it back over the artificial sort. This one will be a sleeping cat.” I like to do them sleeping. It looks passive, and I think it’s less difficult for the subconsciou. Sleeping ones are lovely and most people agree and go with it .”

Not all pet owners want a grief object. Fowler has mounted the head of a young man’s terrier on a shield. It was an unusual request, but it didn’t upset her.” Some people would be shocked, but no one would think twice about a deer or a game animal. I do get a few people attacking me on Facebook. But people want it done. And I love animals. I think they[ her critics] must think I’ve scalped them alive or something, but I love fur and feather and this is about maintaining that beauty .”

Her worst experience was a woman who first arranged for her cat to be stuffed and then asked her to take it out of the storage freezer and thaw it because she had bought a magical incantation on the internet that was guaranteed to bring it back to life. It didn’t work.

And then there was Elfie. Elfie was a cat who was fulfilling an important attachment role for her two owneds, Rachel and Matthew, whose relationship was going through a rough patch. Elfie was killed on the road when Matthew was caring for her.” I supposed, what would Rach want- I know, I’ll get her stuffed .”

Does that happen often? junior pastor asks French leader after labrador-griffon cross relieves himself against a fireplace

Like other French chairmen before him, Emmanuel Macron knows the value of a photogenic puppy at the Elysee Palace. His black labrador-griffon cross, Nemo, is the first French presidential pet to come from a rescue centre, and since his arrival the summer months he has been photographed in the gardens and even standing to attentionon the palace steps to welcome Niger’s president, Mahamadou Issoufou.

But two-year-old Nemo brought a whole new meaning to the term presidential leaks this weekend where reference is cocked his leg for a long and abundant wee against an ornamental fireplace in Macron’s gilded office during a filmed meeting between the president and junior ministers.

In the footage for the channel TF1, three junior pastors are in Macron’s ornate office talking to the president about inner-city investment when Nemo alleviates himself behind them. Macron and the ministers look on helpless until the dog finishes.” I wondered what that noise was ,” says the junior minister for ecology, Brune Poirson, who had been talking when the dog began alleviating itself.

Jacques Chirac’s miniature white maltese, Sumo, was banished by the former president after becoming so depressed about leaving the presidential palace to move into a flat that he began routinely savaging his master.

Rome academic wins landmark court case where she argued that two days taken as leave to care for dog should be allowable

An Italian woman has won her battle to be granted sick pay for days she took off to look after her poorly puppy, in a first for the pet-loving country.

The woman, a Rome academic, won her instance with the help of lawyers from the Italian Anti-Vivisection League( LAV ), one of the biggest animal rights groups in Europe, the organisation said.

A judge accepted the lawyers’ example that her university should count her two days off under an allowance for absences related to” serious or household personal reasons “.

Their argument was underpinned by a provision in Italy’s penal code that provides for people who abandon an animal to” grave suffering” to be jailed for a year and fined up to EUR1 0,000.

” It is a significant step forward that recognised that animals that are not maintain for financial gain or their working ability are effectively members of the family ,” said LAV president Gianluca Felicetti.

Ninety per cent of Britons think of their pet as part of the family 16% even included them on the last census. But recent research into animals emotional lives has cast doubt on the ethics of petkeeping

It was a Tupperware tub of live baby rats that stimulated Dr Jessica Pierce start to question the idea of pet ownership. She was at her local branch of PetSmart, a pet store chain in the US, buying crickets for her daughters gecko. The newborn rats, creaking in their plastic container, were brought in by a man she believed was offering to sell them to the store as pets or as food for the resident snakes. She didnt ask. But Pierce, a bioethicist, was troubled.

Rats have a sense of empathy and there has been a lot of research on what happens when you take newborns away from a mom rat not surprisingly, they experience profound distress, she says. It was a slap in the face how can we do this to animals?

Pierce went on to write Run, Spot, Run, which outlines the suit against pet ownership, in 2015. From the animals that become dog and cat food and the puppy farms churning out increasingly unhealthy purebred canines, to the goldfish sold by the purse and the crickets by the box, pet ownership is problematic because it denies animals the interests of self-determination. Ultimately, we bring them into our lives because we want them, then we dictate what they feed, where they live, how they behave, how they look, even whether they get to keep their sex organs.

Does this mean that, in 50 years or 100 years, we wont have pets? Institutions that exploit animals, such as the circus, are shutting down animal rights activists claimed a significant victory this year with the closure of Ringling Bros circus and there are calls to end, or at the least rethink, zoos. Meanwhile, the number of Britons who profess to be vegan is on the rise, skyrocketing 350% between 2006 and 2016.

Widespread petkeeping is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the 19 th century, most animals owned by households were working animals that lived alongside humans and were regarded unsentimentally. In 1698, for example, a Dorset farmer are available in his diary: My old dog Quon was killed and cooked for his grease, which yielded 11 lb. However, in the 19 th and 20 th centuries, animals began to feature less in our increasingly urban environments and, as disposable income grew, pets became more desirable. Even as people began to dote on their pets, though, animal life was not attributed any intrinsic value. In Run, Spot, Run, Pierce reports that, in 1877, the towns of New York rounded up 762 stray dogs and drowned them in the East River, jostle them into iron crates and lifting the crates by crane into the water. Veterinarian turned philosopher Bernard Rollin recalls pet owners in the 1960 s putting their dog to sleep before going on holiday, reasoning that it was cheaper to get a new puppy when they returned than to board the one they had.

Can I stick my puppy in a car and take him to the veterinarian and say: I dont want him any more, kill him, or take him to a city shelter and say: I cant keep him any more, I hope you can find a home for him, good luck? tells Gary Francione, a prof at Rutgers Law School in New Jersey and an animal rights proponent. If you are able to do that, if you still have the right to do that, then they are still property.

Crucially, our animals cant tell us whether they are happy being pets. There is an illusion now that pets have more voice than in the past but it is maybe more that we are putting words into their mouth, Pierce says, pointing to the abundance of pets on social media plastered with witty projections written by their parents. Maybe we are humanising them in a way that actually builds them invisible.

If you accept the argument that pet ownership is morally questionable, how do you put the brakes on such a vast industry? While he was writing his 2010 volume, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, Herzog was analyse the motivations of animal rights activists and whether it was emotion or intellect that pushed them towards activism. One of the subjects, Herzog tells, was very, very logical. After he had become a vegan, shunned leather shoes and convinced his girlfriend to run vegan, he considered his pet cockatiel. I recollect; he looked up wistfully. He said he got the bird, took it outside, let it loose and it flew up, Herzog recollects. He said: I knew she wouldnt survive, that she likely starved. I guess I was doing it more for myself than for her.

Although Pierce and Francione agree that pet ownership is wrong, both of them have pets: Pierce has two dogs and a cat; Francione has six rescue dogs, whom he considers refugees. For now, the argument over whether we should own animals is largely theoretical: we do have pets and devoting them up might cause more damage than good. Moreover, as Francione suggests, caring for pets seems to many people to be the one area where we can actually do right by animals; persuading people of the opposite is a hard sell.

Tim Wass, the chair of the Pet Charity, an animal welfare consultant and a former chief officer at the RSPCA, concurs. It has already been decided by marketplace forces-out and human nature current realities is people have pets in the millions. The question is: how can we help them care for them correctly and properly?

If the short history of pet ownership tells us anything, it is that our attitude towards animals is prone to change. You see these rises and autumns in our relationships with pets, says Herzog. In the long haul, I think petkeeping might fall out of fashion; I think it is possible that robots will take their place, or perhaps pet owning will be for small numbers of people. Cultural tendencies come and go. The more we think of pets as people, the less ethical it is to keep them.

Not only is it a major hassle to actually transport your puppy or cat to the vet, but you usually end up paying route too much for way too little time spent with the actual veterinarian.

Vetted wants to change this. The startup offer on-demand veterinary services to your house for a flat $99 fee. To help achieve this, theyve raised $3.3 million in seed fund fromFoundation Capital, with Amplify LA, Sterling.VC and ReimaginedVentures also participating.

The viability of Vetted rests on the practicality of performing veterinary services on your living room floor. ButAli Shahid, co-founder and COO of Vetted, says that 89 percentage of questions related to veterinarian visits can be treated at home including skin, ear, eye and gastrointestinal issues.If your pet has a major issue that requires a procedure done in a sterile and specialized environment, Vetted will direct you to a local brick-and-mortar veterinarian that theyve vetted( pun intended ?)

So while a Vetted veterinarian wont be able to treat all issues, they probably can treat a lot more issues than you think without having you trek into an office. They also explained that vet techs call the owner after each appointment is scheduled to discuss symptoms over the phone, and determine if the questions can be treated at home before they even arrive.

Included in the $99 fee is an exam, Q& A, nail clippings and ear cleanings( which most vets charge extra for) and a follow-up video or telephone call. Any additional services like inoculations or prescriptions are also provided at 25 -4 0 percent cheaper than brick-and-mortar veterinarians. Unlike some on-demand companies that are opaque about their pricing and monetization strategy, Vetted is pretty up-front about it. These cost savings essentially come from not having to pay the overhead costs like rent and maintenance associated with a physical location.

Other companies are also working in this space Treat, based in San Francisco, also offers $99 visits, as well as the option to chat online with a vet before they come visit. PawSquad is an U.K.-based startup doing the same thing overseas. But the market is huge calculates tell Americans expend around $60 billion a year on their pets so theres definitely room for multiple players, especially if theyre currently all tackling different regions.

Right now Vetted is just live in West Los Angeles which helps give it a response time of less than 90 minutes as long as they have a veterinarian available. Theyll slowly expand throughout Los Angeles and Orange County, with this new funding being used primarily for broader western coast expansion.